Hacker figures out how to game Reddit with scripts

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Looking to get some incoming traffic to your blog, but don’t want to have to go through the bother of generating worthwhile content? You’re in luck: someone has figured out how to quite successfully gain the Reddit system.

Created by hacker Esrun, the hack is done through a script that registers a group of Reddit accounts through a series of different IP addresses, with the only user requirement being the entry of the CAPTCHA, which doesn’t take very long.

Once the accounts have been acquired, you simply submit a story, and set the new accounts to vote on it. This is where it gets clever, though: not all of the votes are up-votes, which would look suspicious. Rather, some accounts vote up while others vote down.

If you do this enough times, the mix of up and down votes automatically places the story in Reddit’s controversial section, where it also doesn’t garner as much suspicion from Reddit’s official moderators.

The results seem pretty good, but obviously, the whole hack will undoubtedly prove less successful once Reddit’s moderators get wind that it’s so easy to game a controversial story. You probably have a few days until that happens, though, so if you’re feeling particularly immoral and your script kiddy skills are up to snuff, you can try it out for yourself.